Serenity

Hey guys ,

Been a while . Hope you're all doing well .

So , my brother asked me to help him out with his art project . The theme was to use his body somehow as a tool for art . So we decided to make growing tattoos .

I had to track , camera project , model his body ( for geo tracking & projecting ) & the room ...etc . I only had my canon PowerShot to use ( the normal camera I had with me in England ) , so as you can imagine , it didn't shoot the highest quality of videos , hehehe , which was the trickiest part of this whole project . After many failed attempts , we ended up with only two days to shoot & get the job done . Also because the camera was bad , I had to stick relatively big tracking markers on my brother's body .

The hardest part of it all was removing the big tracking markers & putting his skin back on , especially since lighting was constantly changing on his skin while he was moving . To over come this , I had to build the areas that covered the markers , render to texture ( that means projecting my brother's skin with the markers on the geometry ) & remove the tracking markers in PS . Of course I had to do this on a few different frames throughout the shot & blend them together to match the lighting ( one frame just didn't cut it ) .

For tracking , I had to denoise the footage in After Effects , especially on the blue channel . I had to use relatively high settings , otherwise the track would keep jittering , which is why I used big markers in the end . Also , I used big white triangles sticked with normal glue on his back , as other shapes & sizes didn't give good results . I also tricked PFTrack into thinking that the geometry track was actually a camera track ( to get access to the smoothing of the curves & improving the solution options , which is not available for simple geometry tracking/motion tracking ) . Of course I also had to animate my brother's body geometry to go along with his organic movements ( spine bending & such ) . But if you concentrate , you'll still see a bit of sliding .

I used 3DS Max , PFTrack , AE & PS for this project . The tattoos are from the videocopilot's Evolution floursh collection ( but they can easily be done in AE from scratch should you choose to ) . In the end , I used soft light to blend the tattoos with the footage so it would catch the lighting of the environment .

So , without further ado , here it is ( sorry about the quality , I had to compress it a lot to be able to upload it to youtube ) :



Let me know what you think ;)

Animated textures in Maya

Hey Guys,

I thought I’d explain animated textures. Years ago In a galaxy far far away using 3dsmax I used a sequence of files for example:

Test.0001.tif
Test.0002.tif
Test.0003.tif
Test.0004.tif
Test.0005.tif

You would store these files in a folder and then write a small batch file and save it as an IFL (Image File List), so - animated.ifl

It seems maya uses IFF instead of IFL

http://www.spafi.org/index.php?Itemid=29&id=287&option=com_content&task=view

You would also have a path name to where the files are being stored.

So in theory you can have animated reflections, if you export the footage opposite your scene as tif’s.

Here is a link on the subject, maybe Theiry can have a look ? might be quite interesting.

Seb